


They Come Out At Night

by tristesses



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Multi, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:31:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snapshots through time, places, and people. A series of drabbles, some Nolanverse and some fitting into comics canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Myth of Reality

**Author's Note:**

> These were all posted in the month of October, 2008.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bruce/Harvey; _Batman-Bruce and Two-Face-Harvey have much in common._

Batman. In the mask, he is – so solid, so sure. Formidable, dangerous, standing on the brink of an edge and looking down into the depths. He says, I have seen the creatures of Hell on earth, and I can fight them. Certainty. All the nouns in the world are not enough to describe what he is, who he is, to Bruce outside the mask, where he is dislocated, weak, a frail thing, a fractured wing – so misbegotten, he knows what he is. A waste drowning in the wastelands.

This is who he is when the other man comes. He too understands duality, the thin line between reality and super-reality. He pulls at Bruce's hair, licks at the blood on his scalp after he smashes it against a coffee table. When he is inside Bruce, everything is terribly still except the rocking within him, still like how Bruce's world can never be, still and not shaking like Bruce every inhalation, still like corpses who feel no pain. Bruce spreads his fingers against the glass of his coffee table. There's scraped-off skin from his head on the sharp edge. He leaves palm prints against the glass, shuts his eyes against Two-Face's mad reflection, and prays for Batman to save him.


	2. Trois Visages

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joker/Harley; _Nothing matters now except what Mistah J. said._

**I. Avant**  
In the end, they all look the same (contorted, panting, eyes squinted, mouths wet), and she feels the same, every time (as a schoolgirl, in her leotard, on her knees in her professor’s office) – scornful and angry; they make it too easy. She could achieve more, but flash your tits, say you’ll swallow, and you’ve got him by his cock; you can make him do whatever you like. You can _go_ places.

But now she looks into this gashed face and trembles. He is more than a man, mercurial and danger-sweet, and for once she doesn’t know what to do.

 **II. Contrôle**  
She loses control so quickly, so prettily – he can see it in the puzzled/frightened/exhilarated crinkles in her forehead, her pulse beating so swiftly in her throat. A sweet girl, really, but just too painfully _stupid_ like the rest of the lumbering apes that make up her species. She wets her lips and looks at him, eyes brimming – he can name every compound and hormone swimming through her blood at this moment, and if he wanted he could mix ‘em up and make quite a nice _bang_ – but instead he smiles silkily and strokes her cheek, and she’s his. All his.

 **III. Il faut qu'elle...**  
 _Before_ she would never have used greasepaint like this, white and sticky and pore-clogging, but now she must, to resemble him as much as possible. She’d worn leotards once, _before_ , slipping through air slick like a fish, but now she must wear it because he said to. _Before_ – well, before she had a name, a job, a family, and she positively fucking hated it, and now she loves her life, because Mistah J. said to.

She fits the mask over her white face and smiles manically, her full cheeks crooking it slightly. She’s his, all his.

It’s so easy now.


	3. Holiday Season

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley/Ivy; _Ivy has the_ best _Christmas trees._

Red is like Christmas, all copper-penny hair and vibrant leaf skin. She makes Harley think of presents and cocoa and naughty X-mas elves, and during the winter (like tonight) she smells like pine trees and where Harley licks her she tastes like sticky sap. The first time they did this Red flushed a berry stain and stuttered, so weirdly shy – Harley’s never seen her like that with a man, and is a woman really that different? Guess so, because she’s the only one Red ever kisses, leaving minty lipstick prints on Harley’s round cheeks, a present for the happy holidays.


	4. Masks of Roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harley/Ivy, Scarecrow; _Ivy is always the one to pick up the pieces, and Harley is always the broken one._

**I. Bloom**  
Blood trickles through her white facepaint. Her eyebrows and lip are split; bruises blossom along her cheekbone. She’s bit her tongue and her words are garbled, but Ivy hears everything she says: _Oh, Mistah J., he didn’t do it on purpose, he was just foolin’ around, anyway it was my fault, I screwed up and ruined his surprise…_

Classic excuses, every one of them; Ivy knows what Scarecrow would say about it. Damaged goods, he’d sneer, Electra complex, displaced castration anxiety. And beyond the psychobabble, he’d be right.

“Oh, Harl,” Ivy sighs, and presses a kiss to her sticky lips.

 

 **II. Petals Fall**  
Ivy says nothing as she pours her pollen mixture from one test tube to another in their makeshift lab, but her tight grip on the beakers tell him all he needs to know; the snoring body of Joker’s girlfriend on Ivy’s couch merely emphasizes his thought. What a tool; she’s acting out complexes the psychiatric field long ago dismissed. Scarecrow wants to show them Harley; analyzing _her_ would certainly be an eye-opener.

Vines in Ivy’s hair squirm; roses bloom. The petals caress her cheek, hiding her eyes. Scarecrow considers saying something, then decides against it. She’ll pretend she isn’t crying, anyway.


	5. The Average Gotham Citizen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous Gotham citizens, Bruce Wayne/Batman; _An interview, a tabloid, and the man himself._

**I. Gossip Rags**  
Bruce Wayne is a bit of a bastard, you know – all flash and style with no substance whatsoever, despite his many donations to charities. (They’re all prompted by that black-suited Jeeves always hanging around, and even that’s just for show.) He fucks supermodels like it’s a sport and spends his nights in coke-addled hazes. Probably can’t remember what he did the night before most of the time. He’s cute though. Gotta give him that, he’s like a Calvin Klein model, with those abs! _I’d_ like to see ‘em in person! Ha!

But still, like I said. All style, no substance.

 **II. "Loch Ness Monster sighted giving Elvis a lift to Mars!"**  
They say Batman has wings. Like, real wings, sprouting out of his back. That’s why he became a superhero – vigilante – whatever. If you’re deformed like that, what _else_ are you supposed to do?

They say he’s a supergenius, a real Stephen Hawking, minus the wheelchair. But he builds all his gadgets himself and uses them to fight crime. He could be selling weapons to al-Qaida. Nah. He doesn’t care about money.

They say he’s in love, or was in love, with a childhood friend who died. I don’t know how true that is. Because…can a man like him even love?

 **III. Duality**  
The mask is stifling, but his real face is worse. The choice is difficult: be Batman, be a hero, with the world worshipping you, depending on you. Or be Bruce, a trust-fund baby with a possible drug problem, hated and envied by most – but without responsibilities, no further ways to fuck up, no one to let down. He is so tired of letting people down.

In the end, though, he makes the same choice, over and over – the mask, always the mask, over the flesh-and-blood face of the man he isn’t. Neither is real; sometimes, he can’t tell them apart.


	6. Faulty Planning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane Doe, Dr. Crane; _One is a scientist, one is an experiment._

**I. Hypothesis**  
She was a curiosity, at first, a psychological aberration whose existence was not based in logic or rationality but chaos and mimicry; Crane observed her for weeks, as closely as he could - in the mess hall, the activity yard, via the notes taken by Ivy (she was a scientist, after all) in exchange for tender shoots of grass to hide in her cell. But Jane was nothing, a void, a vacant space, a vacant mind. Perhaps caused by severe head trauma, a neurological misfire. Crane wasn’t sure. All he knew was the next phase of the experiment: direct contact.

 **II. Experiment**  
Jane watched the man squirming on the floor with detached curiosity; these convulsions were not the normal sort. The fear toxin usually caused relaxation of the muscles rather than these sharp, sudden contractions. Odd, very odd. Perhaps she’d absorb the clown-chemist and see precisely why this occurred, as Crane himself didn’t seem to know. Scarecrow scrabbled at his own throat. Scratchy straw-hands were clinging and strangling him. Jane turned away, lest she give in to his terror.

The guards smashed through the door, ruining her experiment. No matter, she decided as they knocked her over; she would merely absorb another.


End file.
